Chapter 3 Preface: Invisible Life (3)

Yes, millions of women throughout history have been like that, brave and nameless.According to the latest academic theory, most of the anonymous texts in the history of literature may have been written by women.On other occasions, women create works that are subsequently published by their spouses (or men in their family: father, brother, son), as was the case with the Spanish woman Maria Martínez Sierra (1874-1974).She was a socialist and feminist, a member of Parliament for the Second Republic and an important playwright, although her works were published under her husband Gregorio's name.It is also mentioned that women's works are always lost and forgotten. For example, the Greek Elena's epic "Trojan War" was lost, and Homer was inspired by her.In short, as Virginia Woolf questioned: What happened to Judith Shakespeare, Shakespeare's dreamy, ambitious, brilliant sister?

On the other hand, our memories of women and their actions are often tainted by sexist values.For example: we have not forgotten Messalina, the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius I, who went down in history as an infidelity and a nympho woman.The memory of Catherine the Great, the famous Russian empress, was a woman who took up arms and was ready for battle and had many lovers.Yet the woman who steered the empire from 1762 to 1796 was one of the great monarchs of enlightened despotism.She reformed the administrative system of the Russian government, drew up the first legislative outlines, fought the Lithuanians and Turks, abolished Ukrainian autonomy; if all this were not enough, she protected literature and art, kept frequent Correspondence, she wrote the play and founded "Any Fool Newspaper", as an important ideological pillar of absolutism.She had multiple lovers, yes, like most male monarchs of any age, but unlike many of those kings and emperors, she knew how to keep her lovers purely private They influence her politically.

①Breda: a city in the province of North Brabant in the southwest of the Netherlands--Annotation.Still, when one ventures into the backyard of history, one encounters amazing women: the same as a diver who peeks out beneath the calm waters of a tropical ocean to discover the riches of the seafloor (an unexpected spectacle of fish and coral) , they appear beneath the monotonous traditional image of female tameness.For example, there are female warriors there, and there are characters who behave extremely grotesquely.Like Maria Pérez, a twelfth-century Castilian heroine who disguised herself as a man to fight Muslims and Aragonese.Maria fought a duel with King Afonso I of Aragon, nicknamed "The Gladiator", and the king was defeated and had his weapons confiscated.When people discovered that Maria was a woman, they gave her a title - "a woman like a man".This did not prevent her from subsequently marrying a prince and giving up the war for the sake of the family.And the fantastic Mary Read, the eighteenth-century English adventurer who also disguised herself as a man and joined the Flemish infantry as a soldier.After a few years of fighting she left the army and married and opened a tavern in Breda.After her husband died, she re-dressed as a man, joined the Dutch infantry, and boarded a ship bound for America.The ship is captured by pirates, and at that moment the indomitable Mary Read decides to be a pirate.Her pirate life lasted for many years, during which she fell in love with a seaman and married him. In 1720 she fell to the British and was imprisoned in Jamaica, where she died.

Seventeen-year-old Juana de Arco also put on the gleaming male armor to command the battle, leading the French army to fight the British, and severely damaged the British army.At the age of nineteen, he was captured by the enemy and burned alive.At the end of the seventeenth century, another French woman, Louise Bruvel, dressed as a man; she killed another soldier in a duel, was expelled from the army, and then joined the army as a sailor, commanding a barque.In a naval battle with the Netherlands, at the age of twenty-five, she was injured and died in a ship collision. It wasn't just the female warriors who wore men's clothing and adopted masculine personalities. Many other women were forced to use the shelter of a masculine identity to avoid misogyny.For example, Concepcion Arenal (1820-1893), a famous Galician female sociologist and thinker, had to dress up as a man in order to attend the law department, because women were forbidden to go to university.Something similar happened to Henrietta Faber, who disguised herself as a man at the beginning of the nineteenth century and worked as a doctor in Havana for a few years before disclosing that she was a woman and wanted to marry when she fell in love in 1820; she was arrested for this , and was sentenced to ten years in prison because women are prohibited from studying and practicing medicine in Cuba.On the other hand, the use of masculine pseudonyms was quite common among women writers of the nineteenth century, such as George Eliot, George Sand, Victor Catara, or Fernand Caballero.

①Victor Catalla (1873-1966): Spanish female novelist, writing novels with a naturalistic style in Catalan-Annotation. ② Hornburg: located in Bavaria, Germany - translation notes. Another, more common and socially accepted form of transvestism is religious, to which women have turned for centuries: becoming nuns.The monastery was often a social obligation, a kind of self-enclosure and punishment, but for many women it was a place where they could read, write, take responsibility, enjoy rights, and in short, develop a cause.There have been nuns distinguished by their intellectual level or artistic talent, like Saint Teresa, Saul Juana Inés de la Cruz, or Gerard de Landsberg, Ho Abbot of Enborg, who in the twelfth century completed the first encyclopedia written by a woman in history (the fact that such an ambitious work could be planned shows that the monastery How wide the world has opened), the Hortus Deliciarum ("The Garden of Delight"), is a beautifully illustrated encyclopedia with which she trained her nuns.Other nuns are sensual, like Sol Mariana Alcorforado, a seventeenth-century Portuguese nun who had the misfortune (or luck) of falling in love with a French count and sent him some graceful and frenetic Love letters, which the man had the audacity to publish in Paris in 1669 (thanks, of course, to their preservation).There are also fugitive and aggressive nuns, like Sister Catalina de Erauso, the ensign, who escaped from the convent at the age of eleven and became a sailor under the disguise of a boy, also known as Alonso Dia. Adams joined the army in America.In addition, there are women who want to be independent and choose not to be "good women", that is, nuns, but to be "bad women": court ladies, from the elegant Greek ladies to the Marchioness of Montespoon or The Marquise de Pompadour ②, the mistress of the King of France, these women have always had a very important influence on the public life of the time.

①The Marquise of Montespoon (1641-1707): The mistress of Louis XIV of France for 13 years--annotation. ②Marquise de Pompadour (1721-1764): The mistress of Louis XV in France, who possessed power and was an important patron of literature and art at that time--annotation. ③ Duke of Lerma (1553-1625): The court favorite of King Philip III of Spain (1598-1621) - Annotation.Apart from the monastery and the "easy life," there was only one avenue for women to escape male guardianship, and that was widowhood.Especially when it comes to leadership responsibilities: behind almost every woman who gained power before the twentieth century was a dead husband.In exceptional cases the deceased was the father, and usually had a young son or brother, who were representatives or regents of these people at least at first until they were able to consolidate their own power.It is amazing to see women who are not only intellectually and politically uneducated, but subjected to an entirely obstructive environment, can fight, take on and hold power, often becoming heavyweight rulers.The difficulties faced by these women are best illustrated by the poor but brave Margaret of Austria, who married Philip III at the age of fourteen in 1599 and entered the Spanish royal court, knowing no language but German. .In order not to lose his power over the king, the Duke of Lerma isolated the newcomer Marguerite: dismissed all her German retinues, and surrounded her with his Spanish cronies.One can imagine the pain of the maiden, so isolated in a hostile court and an unfamiliar language environment, bearing one child after another for the royal family.Seven years later, however, she had mastered enough linguistic and political skills to stand up to the Duke of Lerma and be allowed to prosecute him.Backed by the king's confessor, Father Luis de Aliaga, she also tried to sue the Duke of Uceda, but this time she lost.She gave birth to her eighth child at the age of twenty-seven, and complications arose after childbirth, and the Duke of Uceda seemed to prevent her from being treated by a doctor, causing her to die.The tragic fate of a whole woman.

Despite their disadvantages, European history is full of Leonors, Marias, Isabelles, Joanas, Luisa or Marguerites, who at one point or another dictated the destiny of their nation, often by wit and prudence .Of course, there are women in the world who are not so cautious, like Sam Ramat, the queen of the Assyrian Empire in the ninth century BC, had her husband King Ninus assassinated in order to gain power. In two years, the city of Babylon was established and Egypt and Ethiopia were conquered.Another strong woman was Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt (15th century B.C.), who crowned herself pharaoh (female pharaohs are impossible) and held on to power for more than two decades in a productive period .She has always appeared as a man, and her adopted son Thutmose III removed her from the list of pharaohs when he came to the throne.

①The Kingdom of Scythia is an ancient country on the northern shore of the Black Sea--annotation. ② "Beautiful Man" Philip (1268-1314): King (1285-1314) of France and the Kingdom of Navarre (a province of Spain today), married Juana of the Kingdom of Navarre in 1284, thus expanding the His sphere of influence - Annotation.